All posts under ‘Sprott Group’

The Pathological Liars were handed the responsibility of providing us an honest price for silver. Even better – The silver fix was supposedly created to prevent corruption in the silver market. However, not only are the Pathological Liars allowed to trade in the same market where they provide this quasi-regulatory function, but they are by far the largest traders there.

We ask ourselves if JPM & the BIS are operating agents for a higher goal & conclude that there is no free market for gold. Yes, we are convinced that the dollar gold price is controlled by JPM in cooperation with the BIS with knowledge of or by order from the authorities. Is this not a monopoly situation & abuse of power? Most certainly there is no level playing field.

Think about a company that has a very, very large gold deposit. This company 5 years ago would have had (while only owning half the deposit) a $2 billion market cap with one of the biggest copper-gold porphyry deposits in the world. Now it owns the entire deposit and has about an $80 million market cap for the whole deposit. You get twice as much for about 4% of the price.

My conclusion is that this market is only marginally oversupplied and represents approximately 1.5% of the global oil market. If the above assumptions prove accurate then we could very well see an oil market that is in equilibrium if not undersupplied by the end of 2016. My guess is the price of oil begins to move higher long before that moment actually occurs.

Will China, the “engine” of the world’s great economic machine, come chugging to a halt? Not likely. In the weeks ahead, China is likely to experiment with cutting interest rates and further devaluing its currency in order to stabilize the stock market. They may shuttle the bad debt off to warehouse-like institutions while they re-inflate their markets.

The raise in interest rates has met one excuse after another and is once again looking like it will be delayed. The new “extend and pretend” date is now set for December. The FED knows they cannot raise rates & may act ignorant of the facts, but they are not! They know the economy is faulting & the global economy stands on a knife edge, just awaiting a catalyst to begin a renewed downturn.

What has been difficult to document in a definitive way has been the fall in U.S. wages. The problem is that to express U.S. wages meaningfully, we must use “real dollars”, i.e. adjust these wages for inflation. With the U.S. government only providing nominal data about U.S. wages & consistently lying about the actual inflation rate; there’s a lack of data to make any conclusive statement.

Greece now has to run its government according to German dictates. Greece has already outsourced its monetary policy to the ECB & now it’s sort of outsourced its fiscal policy to the German finance ministry. So you’re on a path to unified fiscal policy & ultimately the Eurobonds – bonds backed by full strength & credit of not just any one country but the entire Eurozone.

Of course it has been a very, very tough game for the last four years here. So far, everyone in the press is downplaying gold and silver but I haven’t lost any conviction whatsoever. There are lots of signs that the economy is not strong & it could fall apart pretty seriously all of a sudden. So you had better be prepared. Have some ‘good’ currency — gold and silver.

As we have seen with gold producers, a select group of companies can begin to move higher before the worst companies hit “rock bottom.” Companies now stand to outperform or sink lower based on their individual merits. By the time the overall market is in better shape, the most attractive juniors may no longer be cheap.

The rupee is losing ground against the dollar by around 9% per year. Indian price inflation runs at around 9% per year as well. Yields are clearly too low to maintain purchasing power. Without rising asset prices, stocks and real-estate fail to protect purchasing power. This leaves gold as an alternative destination for savings.

In the last bull market, many big mining companies went after gold mines in higher-risk jurisdictions around the world. Today, investors are retrenching towards areas that are perceived as ‘safe’. Investor preference for safe jurisdiction, coupled with a weak Canadian dollar, make Canadian mining assets especially appealing.

As Western bankers debauch – and destroy – the world’s paper currencies (and at an accelerating rate), the sane populations of Asia are funneling ever-greater quantities of their own wealth out of that paper (where it can be stolen via “competitive devaluation”) and into gold and silver, where it is immune to the crime of currency-dilution.

In the case of gold and silver, massive reinvestment (of profits) is required to find new bodies of ore to mine, to replace those which have been depleted through previous operations. Any long-term price for these metals which is below the full cost of production (plus necessary profit) is not sustainable, and thus below the “minimum price”.

The rig count in the Middle East continues to climb, hitting a new record in Feb. This is a clear indication that OPEC has NO intentions of easing up on their overproduction of oil anytime soon. OPEC has two targets in this campaign & the effectiveness of its strategy cannot be denied. WTI Crude is once again below the $50 mark.

Today almost a third of student debt is going unpaid. The White House’s solution is to revisit bankruptcy laws surrounding student debt. It is looking like a new bill will be passed, one that will restructure student debt laws. Get ready for the next wave of QE, the next wave of money printing. QE to infinity continues.

Cheaper oil prices don’t just come ‘out of the blue.’ Other commodities used for raw materials, construction & economic growth, have been languishing too. Real median incomes remain stagnant since the Great Recession. These are all signs that the recovery we are seeing is mainly asset inflation brought on by cheap debt, not economic growth.

Platinum gets a lot of analyst interest and there was a lot speculation about a potential supply squeeze in platinum and palladium last year. Yet there was no breakout. When it comes to the platinum shortage — same as with the zinc and uranium shortages — it may take months or years to actually play out for various reasons.

With a sane (and apparently honest/legitimate) government achieving election in Greece; the past six years of European “bail-out” fraud is about to be fully exposed. Indeed, the recent history of Greece, alone, is little more than a road-map of fraud, conclusively illustrated by a concise summation of events.

The whole precept that printing money is good, that somehow zero or negative interest rates are good, is totally fallacious. Unimaginable & yet somehow the investment public has bought into it. So probably in less than 10 years we will see physical assets backing currency. Of course, the most likely physical asset is gold.